3 Granted, the debates taking place on the matter nowadays – heated as they may be – bear considerably weaker political motivations than those which characterised the Fischer-era discourse on the question of German war guilt, but for two key reasons it would still be premature to summarise the current historiographical landscape by validating John Röhl’s observation that ‘the controversy over the immediate causes of the First World War appears to be at last drawing to a close.’ 4 The first reason is contextual: Röhl’s statement applied to the Fischer-era controversies which had sparked a new wave of scholarship on the events of July 1914, which by the turn of the 1970’s had mostly subsided in favour of allowing new avenues of investigation – some of which were born out of the controversy – to appear in the historiography. 2 Yet still the general public and historians remain intrigued by the First World War’s origins, whether in isolation or in relation to the conflict itself. Indeed, it seems characteristically excessive – obsessive even – for the historical academia to continue a century-old debate over events which took place in the span of 38 days though the July Crisis is by no means a special case in the disparity between its chronological scope and the amount of historiographical attention afforded to it. With the centenary of the First World War’s outbreak well past us, and with no witnesses of the conflict left alive, one might wonder why works on the events of July 1914 continue to be published – or more pertinently, why it remains a contentious matter.
1 As July gave way to August, those same statesmen made the critical policy choices which culminated in declarations of war, and by the first weeks of autumn the continent had been plunged into the conflagration of the Great War. In the weeks following the assassination, statesmen across Europe’s Powers found their governments becoming increasingly involved with the diplomatic crisis which the Sarajevo murders initiated. The narrative remains largely unchanged: on the afternoon of June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand along with his wife are shot and killed by Bosnian-Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip while on a visit to Sarajevo. Though no clear consensus has formed on the critical question of who started the war, the rejuvenated interest around the July Crisis in both academic and public circles demonstrates that the topic remains a debate worth continuing. The political distance from the 'war guilt' questions of 1914 has enabled historians to explore the origins of the war in greater detail and even open up new directions in the historiographical landscape.
By reviewing the recent English-language literature and comparing the various approaches academics have taken to analyse the July Crisis, it is clear that we have entered a new historiographical 'phase:' a flourishing of theses and arguments which have followed from - yet remain distinct to - the post-Fischer consensus of the late Cold War. With the passing of the centenary in 2014, a new wave of publications has expanded the scope and depth of historians' investigations on the outbreak of the Great War. The causes of the First World War remains a historiographical topic of contention more than 100 years on from the start of the conflict.
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